Customer Reviews

Hand of the Wind

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I enjoyed savoring these poems. Connolly's writing illuminates physical and emotional landscapes that are interconnected. This book is part elegy for her father,part examination of the complicated relationship she felt with her mother, and part acknowledgement of the often sensuous geographic and similtaneously sere economic contexts in which her life was steeped to a maturity. All of it is written with the poet's eye for the telling detail, the arresting image, and the unexpected turn of a phrase:

Connolly's poems will entrance through multiple readings--the suppleness and surprise of their language, the versatility of their form, the layers of honesty and insight. The world they give birth to is authentically rural, often wild, where sharply observed animals and plants coexist with starkly remembered loss. It's a world that manifests again and again the ever-changing, nuanced, but potent truth of mood.

"Hand of the Wind" is a tender, elegant collection, not one word wasted, not one image foggy, not one overdone. Geraldine Connolly has the ability to take an everyday experience and make of it a magical event. My favorite line: "Smoke curls, dear one. Wheels clack and turn."